In some cases, surfaces can display both high water and oil repellency simultaneously, which are known as superomniphobic surfaces. Super liquid repellent coatings and surfaces are useful in a broad range of applications, including self-cleaning, [12] water-oil treatment, [13,14] fabric/textile repellency, [11,15] thermal management/latent heat transfer, [16,17] drag reduction, [18] structural insulation, [19] and fluidic devices. [20] These designed structures can be artificially constructed by various techniques like lithography, [10,21] templating/molding/imprinting, [22][23][24] plasma and chemical etching, [25,26] spin/ dip/spray coating, [11,27,28] electrodeposition/electrospinning, [29] and chemical vapor deposition. [30,31] These methods often require intricate templates, complex multistep procedures, or a combination of several different methods that are highly process-intensive in order to achieve super-repellency. For example, many studies rely on photolithography to create the liquid repellent topological relief structures, a process that requires numerous steps, such as spin coating of a photoresist, ultraviolet light exposure through a photomask, and pattern development and etching. Further, many approaches rely on liquid-based processing that present challenges related to the use of solvents, including substrate damage, solvent residue, and poor coating quality.The goal of achieving a superomniphobic coating or surface using a simple approach that overcome current processing challenges remain elusive. Here, we offer a one-step, direct and solvent-free approach for creating low surface energy textured surfaces with super liquid repellency by applying the initiated chemical vapor deposition (iCVD) process. iCVD vaporizes liquid precursors, typically monomers and initiators, to directly grow polymers on a variety of substrates. By bypassing the liquid phase, iCVD overcomes poor wettability and substrate damage often associated with liquid processing. The iCVD approach also provides precise process control and tunability to achieve desired polymer structure and properties without further post-treatment, such as removing solvent residues. The kinetics of iCVD polymerization reaction on the substrate surface is known to be controlled by monomer adsorption, i.e., the more monomer available at the surface the faster is the polymer growth. iCVD studies have shown that a simple parameter controls the overall deposition kinetics, which is the fractional saturation of monomer, z, defined as the ratio of the monomer partial pressure in the gas phase to its Highly liquid repellent (superhydrophobic, superoleophobic) surfaces are fabricated using mostly top-down approaches and liquid-based processing. Top-down approaches, like lithography and templating, are highly processintensive, while liquid-based processing, like etching and fluoropolymer solution coating, rely on solvents that often damage the substrate. Ultimately, to suppress liquids from spreading, the goal is to create a surface with low surface energy ...

Initiated chemical vapor deposition (iCVD) is a reactive process that creates polymeric materials on a surface from vapor‐phase monomers and thermal initiators. Our iCVD synthesis of poly(perfluorodecyl acrylate) (PPFDA) resulted in the growth of micro‐ and nano‐worms normal to the surface. The micro‐ and nanostructures of the worms directly depend on iCVD process conditions. They in turn influence bulk properties such as their liquid wettability. The current absence of a physiochemical model that can explain the relationships between iCVD process conditions and bulk properties of the polymers motivates the use of data‐driven modeling to capture and describe the relationships. In this work, we report iCVD data (contact angles of heptane, octane, and water on PPFDA and process conditions) from 49 batches and use artificial neural networks to model the relationships. The models are then used to determine the optimal iCVD process conditions that maximize the contact angles on PPFDA.

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